It’s not often we plug books we haven’t even read! These look like they will be interesting and useful – once we’ve read them, we’ll post up reviews:)

Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below

by Peter Gelderloos

Are alternative energies and Green New Deals enough to deliver environmental justice? Peter Gelderloos argues that international governmental responses to the climate emergency are structurally incapable of solving the crisis. But there is hope.

Across the world, grassroots networks of local communities are working to realise their visions of an alternative revolutionary response to planetary destruction, often pitted against the new megaprojects promoted by greenwashed alternative energy infrastructures and the neocolonialist, technocratic policies that are the forerunners of the Green New Deal.

Gelderloos interviews food sovereignty activists in Venezuela, Indigenous communities reforesting their lands in Brazil and anarchists fighting biofuel plantations in Indonesia, looking at the battles that have cancelled airports, stopped pipelines, and helped the most marginalised to fight borders and environmental racism, to transform their cities, to win a dignified survival.

You can pre-order the book from here

The Book of Trespass

by Nick Hayes

This review is from the Bristol Radical History Group

…the fences that divide England are not just symbols of the partition of people but the very cause of it.

Bristol Radical History Group subscribers will find inspiration in Nick Hayes’s book. He sets out to trespass on a range of properties and rivers throughout England, defiantly ignoring the fact that he – and we – are excluded from 92% of the land in England and 97% of its waterways.

In the course of his walk descriptions, Nick Hayes reveals some surprising historical heroes – William Tyndale, for a time a chaplain at Little Sodbury and now commemorated by a statue in Millennium Square. His translation of the New Testament, says Hayes, was:

“…arguably the single most dramatic de-privatisation of power in the history of England: he had turned the sheep of the Church’s flock into independent, self-determining freethinkers with their own interpretation of God’s will.”

The Church responded by garrotting him and then burning his dead body at the stake.

Occasionally the author can’t resist the temptation to amble off down side paths but his descriptions of nature and his drawings are vivid and the main track of his journey is clear throughout.

…the historic repurposing of the land from common wealth to private profit.

You can order the book from here